ChildCareGroup, the nonprofit organization that is celebrating its 120th anniversary, has seen Dallas through two pandemics. They have been working to support the community since 1901, providing early education and child care to underserved communities in North Texas.
ChildCareGroup CEO Tori Mannes and board member Betsy Cullum recently spoke to The Dallas Morning News about the organization’s deep history in North Texas.
During a recent board meeting, Mannes displayed a copy of the original charter, and Cullum said she could see the signature of her great-great-grandfather.
“She just got the paperwork, and she put it on the screen. And I went, ‘Oh my goodness. That’s my great-great-grandfather,” Cullum said. “My great-great-grandfather was one of the signers of the 1901 document that legally created the first iteration of the ChildCareGroup. Learning that really brought it home to me.”
Cullum has served on the group’s board twice, once in the 80s and currently, all without knowing she had a family tie to the organization.
ChildCareGroup has eight early education centers that allow them to help hundreds of thousands of families. Five are located in Dallas, with one in Garland, one in Mesquite, and one in Corsicana. However, it first began as a settlement house called Neighborhood House that provided resources for the community.
Settlement houses came from a social services movement in the 20th century that aimed to provide education and resources to low-income areas. These houses were generally run by women.
The Neighborhood House provided free childcare and kindergarten for working women and trained future teachers.
“Primarily, the children that we served were immigrant children from all sorts of different backgrounds and their mothers,” Mannes explained. “They were all vulnerable and needed to make money for their families, so many worked at the cotton mills.”
According to Mannes, the organization likes to use their past to make plans and move forward in the present.
She said, “There’s a tremendous throughline in ChildCareGroup’s story because what we knew then, we still know to be true today. And, even more important, we’ve got all of these decades and decades of research and experience behind us to underscore why it works and that it does work.”
The ChildCareGroup worked to help Texas families through the Covid-19 pandemic, but Mannes said it is actually the second pandemic the group has faced. In 1918, during the influenza pandemic, the organization would look after infants when their parents got the Spanish flu.
“We were there then serving on the front lines, caring for the children and the families that need us the most, and we’ve been staying on the front lines throughout the COVID pandemic, doing the very same thing. So I can’t say it’s been easy, but we’ve kept on going,” Mannes said.
Cullum said from the first term she served to this term, she has seen a change in how people look at childcare.
“Back then, the majority of people really didn’t get it,” Cullum said. “When I explained to my friends what I was doing, sometimes I got a glazed-over look, or they’d say ‘No no, high school, that’s where it’s at.’ I really feel that the public has been educated in many ways about the importance of early childhood education. And I really think that particularly in the Dallas area, ChildCareGroup is partially responsible for that because they kept plugging away.”
